The Irascible Professor
SMIrreverent Commentary
on the State of Education in America Today

by Dr. Mark H. Shapiro

"Sex.
In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a
fact."... ...Marlene Dietrich.

Commentary of the Day -
March 30, 2008: To Close or Not to Close -- The Office Door.
Guest commentary by Sanford Pinsker.

For most of my teaching career I
simply didn't think about it: my office was wide open (I thought
of that as "inviting") when I was alone and closed when a
student slipped inside. Granted, those were the days when
my college was all male and when nobody, absolutely, nobody,
thought that trouble might be brewing or a lawsuit just might be
hatching -- that is, if the student came up with a whopper about
being sexually molested.

No
doubt there were professors, then as now, who took advantage of
students in their offices but none of this registered on my
radar. I simply believed that a closed door -- privacy, if
you will -- is best when the subject of the office visit might
get around to a paper that did not pass muster. For many
students, a C- (much less a D or F) is upsetting, and I did
not want to make the problem worse by having their hysterics
waft into the hallway.

I
suppose it was the mid-l990s, when the cultural air was
punctuated by talk of sexual harassment and of sexual harassment
lawsuits, that I first encountered people (one of them was my
wife) who urged an "open office door" policy. Why so? Because
an open office door removes temptation -- not mine, I hasten to
add, but the temptation of that off-the-chart student who, in a
pique of anger about that D paper, accuses me of sexual
harassment.

The
result is a classic she said-he denied case -- and, for me, a
bucket of trouble, even if the case never gets to a campus
smack-down or a civil court. As one person (not my wife)
told me: "It's like proving a negative, back in the old bad days
when certain folks tried to deny that they were Communists."

Academe took sexual harassment seriously, sometimes too
seriously. In the heyday of campus feminism, even a
"ladies room" sign was an occasion for outrage, and anything
that bordered on locker room humor was consigned to the trash
heap, along with the people insensitive enough to traffic
in such off-color jokes. White males, widely known as
patriarchal oppressors, kept their heads low and their office
doors open.

As I
remember it, the college solicitor was asked to inform the
faculty about changes in sexual harassment law and to give us
tips about how to avoid accidents waiting to happen. One
of them was a closed office door.

At
this point I might as well come clean: I continued to close my
office door whenever a student came in for a conference -- not
just the student who wondered if I might look at a new poem she
had just written but also the student whose term paper needed an
extension. And I confess that there were afternoons in the
late twentieth century when I felt like a rebel, even a cultural
hero of sorts. Why? Because the admittedly small act
of a closed office door eloquently testified to my willingness
to buck the crowd (and the times). It also made it clear,
at least to me, that students could share as much as they wanted
to, or were comfortable with, without feeling that every
passerby was part of the action. In my office hours,
students talked to me, and I talked to them, office door closed.

Maybe
I was just dumb and lucky (that's what my wife says), but I was
never accused of sexual harassment, although I was not generally
thought of as a "male feminist." In fact, some female
faculty members were more than suspicious when, in the early,
altogether giddy days of campus feminism, I pointed out what I
thought were the movement's excesses and what I thought were the
movement’s flaws. Interestingly enough, many of my
concerns would be shared a decade later by second and
third-stage feminists who grew weary of their shrill, man-hating
"sisters."

My
hunch is that I would have kept my office door open if any of
the hard-line feminists wanted a sit-down during my office
hours. Or better yet, I would have told them, as politely
as possible, that office hours are for students and that when
they come in, I would ask them to please shut the office door.

The Irascible
Professor comments: Sanford probably should have heeded his
wife's advice. Here at Krispy Kreme U. we now have both a
sexual harassment policy and an amorous relations policy.
The former contains the standard prohibitions against unwanted
advances by the "powerful" against the "powerless", while the
latter policy goes even further to ban consensual amorous or
sexual relationships between "faculty or staff and a member of
the University community for whom they have teaching,
evaluative, advocacy, counseling, advising or supervisory
responsibilities." This policy can have some rather
remarkable consequences. For example, a student who
happens to be married to a faculty member can never take a class
from that person even if he or she is the only person who
teaches a course required for the student's graduation.
Somewhat surprisingly there is no similar policy that prohibits
other close relatives of a faculty member from taking courses
from that person.

We also strictly
adhere to the "open door" policy. So much so that when the
State Fire Marshal reminded the campus that it was illegal to
leave office doors open in our classroom buildings unless they
automatically shut when the fire alarm sounds, a small fortune
was spent equipping our hallways and office doors with magnetic
devices to ensure that we could keep our office doors open and
still meet the fire code requirement.